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04

Aug

2014

A Press Article on the Cryonics Institute

This press article on the history of cryonics and the work of the Cryonics Institute skips over a lot of the important technical details, such as the fact that patients are vitrified these days rather than frozen, a technique that minimizes ice crystal formation in tissues, but is still worth reading:

Inside the brick-fronted warehouse in Clinton Township, the body count has topped 100. Nestled inside Wal-Mart sleeping bags, the bodies stand upside-down within 10-foot-high tanks resembling immense white thermos bottles. This is the Cryonics Institute, and the people in those tanks - "cryostats," they're called - after being declared dead, have had their bodies frozen in perpetuity in the belief that future science may be able to thaw them, cure their ills, and, just maybe, return them to youthful vigor. They've made a bet: that in a time yet to come, they'll rise again, with "death" only a temporary and reversible embarrassment easily remedied by medical know-how.

Death is a gray line and it's always moving. What might have been terminal 150, 15, even five years ago is treatable today. Something as simple as CPR has saved countless lives; cardiac defibrillation - the "shock paddles" used to jump-start a stopped heart - has revived patients previously considered dead. What's "dead" mean to medicine, other than a challenge? From that perspective a storehouse of frozen bodies is no more macabre than a heart transplant, a now-common medical procedure once considered grotesque.

Right now, though, cryonics is more like an in-progress medical trial. Advances in stem-cell research, nanotechnology, and therapeutic cloning give cryonicists hope, but there are no guarantees. Today's frozen people are already dead, or "deanimated," as some prefer; tomorrow's helpful scientists will not only have to successfully thaw their "patients," but return them to life. That's assuming, fingers crossed, that they've been frozen in a recoverable way, without too much tissue damage, and that they've been carefully maintained. Once thawed, they'll have to be treated for being "dead," by whatever methods would make that possible. And who wants to wake up alone in the future in a body already ravaged by time? Better to hope that a new, youthful body is waiting for you.

For older persons like myself who love life and want more of it, we have little choice but to consider cryonics and/or any other 'long shot' at continuing life. For me and persons like me we are obligated to take the risk. I would do so even if the probability of the positive result (coming back to life) was even more remote that it is. Ultimately, one program or another is going to come to the point where it is possible that someone, somewhere is going to say, okay, the time has come. Let us bring Jim back and see what we can do. In the meantime I will continue doing the best I can to stay around, but more importantly, to die a clinical death that allows me the best chance of being preserved in a manner that is most conducive to promoting a successful cryonic outcome. JimE.Mel

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